


Beth

by Morgan_Dhu



Series: Short prose [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Short Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 13:28:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20258854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgan_Dhu/pseuds/Morgan_Dhu





	Beth

Writing Exercise: A former classmate today

I have a time twin: born in the same rural hospital that I was, on the same day, just a few hours after me, but because our early lives took such different paths, I did not come to know Beth until I was seventeen. 

My mother had chosen to stay at the home of her mother during her pregnancy, but after my birth she took me away when I was only a few months old, and rejoined her husband. Barring a few short visits, I did not return to the place I was born until many years, and many towns and cities and changes afterwards. Beth, on the other hand, grew up just outside the small town of Windsor, and spent her childhood in one house, going to one school, playing with the same children, everything constant save for the passage of time itself. 

It was after I had dropped out of school in 1971, and drifted around the continent for a while, looking for the remnants of the flower children without much sucess, that I returned to Nova Scotia, thinking that what I needed instead was to reconnect with my roots. So I chose to stay at the home of my mother's mother, and went back to finish high school, and there she was, our paths through time once more intersecting, my classmate, my time twin, my inverse mirror.

Short where I am tall; fair where I am dark; small and birdquick, fussing and pecking, where I am large and slow to stir my body into action; challenged and troubled and ultimately bored by the puzzles of learning, from the structure of mathematics to the web of history, where I am dazzled and drawn and curiously saddened that it's all so easy; she was everyone and everything that I am not, and could not be, and mostly did not want to be. 

When I think of her, I cannot imagine any other future for her, but a straight and simple line leading onwards from that one year where our lives intersected. It leads towards the wedding she dreamed of even then, with the young man who worked the gypsum boats for money, but planned to settle down eventually and work his father's farm. It leads to her in a floury apron with four or five tow-headed children running wild around her, clucking after them with pride as she rules house and yard and chickenhouse, leaving to her man the cowbarns and hayfields and equipment sheds. It leads to long nights in calving season and worries over how much the new haybaler will cost. To evenings playing Auction 45s with the couple from the farm over the hill and church bingo on Sunday afternoon. To an endless succession of days which may be hard, and may have their share of fear and pain, but which are rarely if ever marred by questions of the existential purpose of it all, and the sudden freefall into terror when you cannot, for just one second, remember who you are or what your life is supposed to mean.

If I were to pull up into her yard today, I know she would invite me in, and set me down in the kitchen to talk -- for women talk in the kitchen, men talk in the barn or the living room, and no one ever talks in the parlour except at weddings and wakes. She would bustle about serving tea and biscuits, wiping the kitchen table with a well-worn dishcloth and hauling in the longjohns and workpants hanging from the laundry line, for even a visit from an woman friend unseen in years does not break the pattern of what women do. And she would ask me questions about the marriage I have ended and the children I never bore and the mortgage I've never held, and think to herself how sad and empty my life has been. And I would ask her about the places she's never gone, and the books she's never read, and all the countless things she's never done, and think the same of her, my twin, my mirror.


End file.
